Hospitalist/programmer in search of the meaning of life

Old About Me

I was born in Columbus, Ohio, but my parents moved to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin when I was about 2 years old. Hence, I am forever a
cheesehead!!! My family still lives in Wisconsin. Thanks to my
brother and sister (and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, of
course), I have 6 beautiful and wonderful nieces and nephews. Being
here on the east coast, I miss them very much and I can’t wait to go
home and see them again.

I went to high school at Brookfield East High
School and
college at the University of Wisconsin -
Madison, obtaining a degree in Medical Science
in 1993. I fell in love with Madison. It has a charm which is unique
in the Midwest. Everyone who knows me has probably gotten sick of me
raving about Wisconsin and Madison, in particular. What can I say?
When you’ve been to paradise, it’s hard to stop talking about it…
After graduating, I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Medical
School, where I received my MD in May of
1996.

I did my internal medicine residency at the New England Medical
Center in Boston, Massachusetts and became a
full-fledged doc on June 30th, 1999. The more time that I’ve spent
away from NEMC, the more I’ve learned to appreciate the lessons and
training that I acquired there. At the time, however, it seemed like
hell. Luckily, I had a bunch of friends going through the same process
and they made hell seem manageable.

After residency, I worked as a locum
tenens physician for about 6
months in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Minnesota. I was drawn away
from clinical medicine by the dot-com gold rush, but I left without
any gold. I worked for a company called
medicalrecords.com. Our goal was to
provide a secure place for the storage of health records, while also
giving users personalized information, tools and programs to improve
their health. It was a very exciting project and I’m sure it will live
again, once someone figures out a way to make money from it.

The big upside of my time away from medicine was that I got to
reacquaint myself with my love of programming. I’ve donated a lot time
to the OpenACS project (among many others) and
received an amazing amount of education and experience in return.